


A Shard Of Infinity

by Resri



Category: Choice of the Deathless (Interactive Fiction), Craft Sequence - Max Gladstone
Genre: Backstory, Cold Weather, Implied/Referenced Violence, Origin Story, The Craft
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-04
Updated: 2019-01-04
Packaged: 2019-10-04 09:10:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 750
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17301854
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Resri/pseuds/Resri
Summary: Marcus Bly was eleven when a raid on his ghetto drove him out into the dead winter fields surrounding the city. Just as it looked like hunger and cold would bring him to his knees, a star fell from the heavens and landed in his hands.





	A Shard Of Infinity

Marcus Bly was eleven when a raid on his ghetto drove him, and everybody else who could run fast enough, out into the dead winter fields surrounding the city. Raids like this happened once every few years when the city had reached its’ limits yet again and the upper class got sick of the beggars and thieves taking up space, and sent security forces to ‘clean up and revive the district’, as they called it. Arrests were the least of the problems. Resistance was met with extreme force, many just disappeared for good. Afterward, the shacks and warehouses were torn down, and the city devoured the open space like a cancerous growth. Laced into a corset of high cliffs and the stormy sea, it could always only go in one direction. In a few weeks, the poor would live at the borders of this new district in shacks and warehouses and old farms that lay abandoned since the fields were bought up by big Concerns. The cycle would start anew. Dresediel Lex wasn’t the only city that gorged itself on ever-dwindling resources. 

Marcus had been running for hours, had left his block and then the familiar streets, then the suburbs, and then the last scattered houses behind to find himself on a field of ice flowers, all by himself, with the blood of his friends staining his clothes as well as his soul. His breath hang in the air like the smoke from the fires in the streets he called his home until today. Frozen earth crunched under oversized boots. Claws of wind wormed their way under his musty coat and the dirty mop of hair to cut into his face and snake down his chest in a deathly embrace. The fingers of an invisible animal dipped between his ribs and painted ice over bruised skin. At the same time, another creature was going berserk on the inside, trying to escape his stomach and break free. In the middle of a lonesome frozen field, under the endless void of a clear night sky, little Marcus Bly’s legs stopped moving, and he wondered if the two creatures would finally tear his body apart in their mad quest to reach each other. 

But just as it looked like hunger and cold would bring him to his knees, a star fell from the heavens and landed in his hands. He hadn’t even realized that he’d reached for it, so transfixed was he by the celestial glimmer that whispered of secrets and power in a language he didn’t understand, but felt thrumming in his veins nonetheless.

The star burned his palms with the heat of a dying sun and the eternal cold of space. While his skin stayed whole, the freezing fire licked beneath, deep into his being, igniting something that was asleep until now but dreamt of awakening since before Markus could remember. Sores of blackened silver and tarnished gold grew on his soul, taking and changing and reforming the mesh of his existence.    
The feeling was divine, all-encompassing, all-consuming. Within moments it became unbearable for an eleven year old’s mind and flesh, but he couldn’t just let it go. One doesn’t have to understand the intricacies of what’s transpiring for them to feel its’ greatness.   
If he wasn't so acutely aware of how it felt to have nothing, he might have released the star into the aether. To sate his ever-burning curiosity, he might have simply watched it die in the cup of his palms. Cold and hunger were plaguing him, though, and either one of them might do him in tonight. All he wanted to do was taste that shard of fiery infinity and know what it felt like before everything ended. 

So without hesitation, Marcus brought the star up to his lips. The same sensation of fire and ice slipped past the sensitive skin and into his mouth, where lightning touched his tongue. 

Everything changed in the blazing agony of the realization that the world was far grander, far brighter and cruller and more beautiful than one could ever have imagined. The fire in his throat was nothing compared to the knowledge that there was so much out there. Overwhelmed, Marcus closed his eyes, but that only replaced the glorious vision of the galaxies beyond with spiderwebs of deeds and consequences. He saw the network of life and death and souls, the dance of all the contracts holding the world together.

And when he reached out, he could touch them.


End file.
